The Field

The Field was commissioned by the Harvard Glee Club and their conductor Andrew Clark for a concert commemorating the sesquicentennial of the American Civil War. The work is based on three poems that I had wanted to set for many years: Crane’s “War is Kind,” Melville’s well-known “Shiloh,” and Sara Teasdale’s “There Will Come Soft Rains,” which is actually about WWI. Originally, I planned to use just one of the poems, but as I reread them, I was struck by how complementary they were. Crane’s “...field where a thousand corpses lie” was echoed in Melville’s “...forest-field of Shiloh,” and the indifferent beauty of the swallows and April rain in “Shiloh” were hauntingly echoed in Teasdale’s poem. As a result, I decided to weave the texts together into a single narrative.

Two aspects of the poems were central to the narrative of the work. First was the indifferent beauty of the swallows flying low over the field, with its thousands of ghastly corpses and dying men lying beneath the beautiful, chaotic geometry of the swallows’ flight. This music was the first part of the work I composed and serves as a haunting refrain. The second aspect of the poems and the narrative is that I allowed the narrative in “Shiloh” — “Of dying foemen mingled there—Foemen at morn, but friends at eve” to lead into “There Will Come Soft Rains,” which serves as a sort of moral of the story. But one question nagged at me: What made these former foes into friends? Here they were, lying one next to the other dying or dead already, the divisions of Blue and Gray, North and South erased by their shared fates. Thus, the concept for the end of the work emerged: the Teasdale text as sung by the dying soldiers is a shared epiphany, the stark realization of what they had done to one another. In order to underscore this scene, I used a Civil-War-era song well-known to soldiers on both sides, which reinforces their shared bond: Just Before the Battle Mother. Thus, the closing section symbolizes the common bond that united the former foes as they awaited their ultimate fate, while perhaps watching the ironic beauty of the swallows “skimming lightly, wheeling still” above them as they lay dying in the field of Shiloh.